AMD Details Asynchronous Shaders In DirectX 12, Promises Performance Gains

[Noctifer]

Another bit of tech that won't ever get wide use... Where have we seen this before??? Maybe AMD should focus more on promoting upcoming hardware than harping on about stuff in older tech that's not been used and probably won't be widely used in the future.

All these innovations from AMD all suffer the exact same issue, they look awesome on a paper but in reality they just aren't used, which leads me to think they must be overly complicated or time consuming for the gains they offer

Actually that tech is going to be in both DX 12 and Vulkan, already used in some PS4 games and works on both NVidia and AMD GPU's.

 

[Boomstick777]

Fact remains Matt AMD are the masters of tech that gets pretty much zero use

Mantle - how many titles?
TrueAudio - How many titles
ASS (Asynchronus Shaders Shizzles) - How many titles?
TressFX - how many titles?
Freesync - how many monitors now?

They cant even release Xfire profiles on a reliable schedule, yet they are willing to sell a card like the 295x2 thats gimped in many titles due to zero support of its xfire feature.

Sorry Matt but im afraid AMD have lost a lot of credibility with people like me, i consider myself an AMD fan, i prefer(ed) their tech over others where possible, but unfortunately for the past few years i see increasingly little reason to pickup their tech over other manufactures.

AMD cannot compete on the CPU front against intel, thats plainly obviously, they have lost monstrous amounts of market share against Nvidia.

Why would i trust my money in a company that may not even be around to offer support on its products before their life span ends?

This isnt a dig at you Matt at all, i understand your hands are tied, but AMD are losing the respect of their consumers on a daily basis now.

You can say the same of Nvidia, how many games utilise physx, even in some of the ones that do the most you get is some extra smoke etc.

At least AMD are still pioneering, they are a smaller company working with a smaller budget. Yet they still lead the way in a lot of areas. For example it was Mantle which pressured Microsoft to get a move on with DirectX 12.

Credit where it's due, AMD are doing the best they can. I think the frustration comes from wanting them to do better, but they are limited in resources in comparison to the competition. I think they do great with what they have, great vision. I do agree that their execution can be woeful, but that makes me like them more tbh.

New AMD cards will be out soon, and hopefully people lay off them a bit. No need to kick them while they are down..

 

[Gloomy]

Nvidia 900-series GPUs also support it, maybe not as well as AMD GPUs (but it's definitely possible), but they do support this on paper. It's part of all the new APIs.

Another bit of tech that won't ever get wide use... Where have we seen this before??? Maybe AMD should focus more on promoting upcoming hardware than harping on about stuff in older tech that's not been used and probably won't be widely used in the future.

All these innovations from AMD all suffer the exact same issue, they look awesome on a paper but in reality they just aren't used, which leads me to think they must be overly complicated or time consuming for the gains they offer

Instead of being negative just because AMD is the one talking about it, maybe you should do your research. This is the real deal, it has real performance gains (for EVERYONE, not just AMD), and it will be used by any developer who wants to optimize both PC and console games properly going forward.

The gains it offers are real. Maybe not the 40% AMD is talking about (that's a little high, though I'm sure some situations will see something like that) but something like 20% will be commonplace.

The only reason why AMD is beating the drum is because they were the first to implement it, and all their recent GPUs support it (Nvidia's 600 and 700 series don't for example), so they get a little bragging rights. But it isn't a new idea. Google "context funneling" and "Hyperthreading" for similar concepts.

 

[Telecaster]

How do you reliably cool a 300w APU that is presumably going to be in mass produced machines?

 

[Boomstick777]

How do you reliably cool a 300w APU that is presumably going to be in mass produced machines?

If we see them , the high end 'Gaming' APU would likely ship with an AIO cooler.

200W - 300W for a gaming capable APU system would still be far lower watt than separate CPU / GPU combo.

Would love to be able to go to an all in one system. Were years away from the type of performance needed for 1440P though. Over the next few years as APU's target 4K, maybe it will be possible to move to APU for 1440P.

6/8 core APU with upgraded GCN and HBM would be perfect for a Mini-ITX..

Future is fusion

 

[Tonester0011]

200W - 300W for a gaming capable APU system would still be far lower watt than separate CPU / GPU combo.

Are we though?
970 paired with a 4690k/4790k sits in the 200-300w bracket. I'd also bet it would offer more performance. There's probably a market for this kind of thing though, super small form factor type things.

Interested, however. Curious what kind of performance something like this will offer, but with AMD's efficiency for both CPU and GPU i doubt it will be *that* impressive.

 

[eddyr]

Some chilling definitely needed. The fact that a feature both being supported by the upcoming DX12, and Nvidia in maxwell2 becomes a negative discussion point or cause for upset is just odd. They are just GPU's, find a co-hobby to take the mind off if it is so stress inducing.

Might be worth adding the anand article to the OP for readers.http://www.anandtech.com/show/9124/amd-dives-deep-on-asynchronous-shading
Some interesting disagreement in the discussion of the differences between AMD and Nvidia's queue/engine capabilities.

Are we though?
970 paired with a 4690k/4790k sits in the 200-300w bracket. I'd also bet it would offer more performance. There's probably a market for this kind of thing though, super small form factor type things.

Interested, however. Curious what kind of performance something like this will offer, but with AMD's efficiency for both CPU and GPU i doubt it will be *that* impressive.

I have been wanting something like this for a while. Since around kaveri was announced I was hoping for a AIO board with soldered gddr5 ram/APU, chuck it into a vesa mountable case and then I can get busy with the business of getting all tingly inside. Someday soon maybe.

 

[humbug]

APU with HBM, updated GCN with Asynchronous Shaders and more CPU cores next year. Up to 300W performance APU (AMD plans to introduce what it described as a High Performance Computing APU or HPC for short. This APU will carry a sizable TDP between 200 and 300 watts.), yes plz !

Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) will allow AMD to boost utilisation and efficiency. With SMT, underutilized parts of the CPU core can be put to use via a secondary execution thread. The end result is superior resource utilization.
This is a contrast to clustered multi-threading which shares resources between two different CPU cores, instead of doing it inside a single CPU core.
AMD never really commented about the how much multi-threading support its upcoming cores would have. Now it seems that AMD's K12 ARM core will support "many threads" instead of just supporting one additional thread as is the case with Intel's high performance CPUs.

Interesting, this is like "Hyper Threading Max"

 

[Boomstick777]

Are we though?
970 paired with a 4690k/4790k sits in the 200-300w bracket. I'd also bet it would offer more performance. There's probably a market for this kind of thing though, super small form factor type things.

Interested, however. Curious what kind of performance something like this will offer, but with AMD's efficiency for both CPU and GPU i doubt it will be *that* impressive.

It's the new architecture on a die shrink I'm looking forward to so they will likely be very impressive. Especially compared to the APU's of today. Would love to switch to all in one. With a single AIO for cooling, nice and quiet. Hopefully in a few years will be able to.

Some chilling definitely needed. The fact that a feature both being supported by the upcoming DX12, and Nvidia in maxwell2 becomes a negative discussion point or cause for upset is just odd. They are just GPU's, find a co-hobby to take the mind off if it is so stress inducing.

Might be worth adding the anand article to the OP for readers.http://www.anandtech.com/show/9124/amd-dives-deep-on-asynchronous-shading
Some interesting disagreement in the discussion of the differences between AMD and Nvidia's queue/engine capabilities.




I have been wanting something like this for a while. Since around kaveri was announced I was hoping for a AIO board with soldered gddr5 ram/APU, chuck it into a vesa mountable case and then I can get busy with the business of getting all tingly inside. Someday soon maybe.

+1

Yeah me to, when APU's can cope at 1440P I'll make the switch. HBM, die shrink and newer architecture should make these upcoming APU's perform significantly better. Probably fine for 1080P gaming. Still they are a long way off, 2016 should be good year for AMD.

 

[andybird123]

Are we though?
970 paired with a 4690k/4790k sits in the 200-300w bracket. I'd also bet it would offer more performance. There's probably a market for this kind of thing though, super small form factor type things.

Interested, however. Curious what kind of performance something like this will offer, but with AMD's efficiency for both CPU and GPU i doubt it will be *that* impressive.

And then look at the size of a decent CPU cooler plus the cooler on a 970 and boggle at the cooler you would need for a 300w APU (plus overclocking)

 

[humbug]

Bit cheeky in that context "Asynchronous Shaders are something that should have arrived a long time ago" - While a lot of it is MS dragging their feet AMD is not exactly whiter than white on that subject.

Asynchronous Shaders is in Mantle, its now a part of DX12, so on this occasion AMD can say Microsoft is dragging its feet if they wanted to. Credit where credit is due, AMD have done something right here, your not even acknowledging that but actually using it to criticise.

Don't you think AMD have the right to say "look at this thing we have"
Nvidia do it all the time, and its aright for them.

I don't understand that mentality if it claims to be neutral, criticise when they do wrong and find a way to criticise when they do right, whatever happens always criticise, thats not neutral, thats tribalism in hardware vendors, its, well, pathetic.

Sorry Roff, i have a lot of respect for you. but i'm seeing spades here.

 

[Tonester0011]

And then look at the size of a decent CPU cooler plus the cooler on a 970 and boggle at the cooler you would need for a 300w APU (plus overclocking)

That's the thing i can't get my head around, the one place this kind of thing will be most beneficial is in small form factor, but it defeats the point if you're needing a 240mm AIO to cool the bloody thing

Don't get me wrong, i love the idea of everything on a chip kind of deal. Just questioning the feasibility of it.

 

[Martini1991]

Can't see why you'd criticize this, exact from the God awful example picture they used (Which was my problem, it's amateur)

 

[humbug]

Can't see why you'd criticize this, exact from the God awful example picture they used (Which was my problem, it's amateur)

Yeah the slides are naff, whoever let them pass needs shooting.

 

[Tonester0011]

Humbug posts always sound like he's projecting.

 

[savagesam117]

I was the same as Martini when I first looked but having a read into it, it makes sense now. Them slides are terrible!!

 

[eddyr]

That's the thing i can't get my head around, the one place this kind of thing will be most beneficial is in small form factor, but it defeats the point if you're needing a 240mm AIO to cool the bloody thing

Don't get me wrong, i love the idea of everything on a chip kind of deal. Just questioning the feasibility of it.

250W seems to be around the limit for un-intrusive cooling in the pcie slot formfactor so with a little more space for a larger heatsink seems doable.

Can't see why you'd criticize this, exact from the God awful example picture they used (Which was my problem, it's amateur)

It did lack a few words. Simply adding 'motion blur postprocessing during panning' in a subtitle or along those lines would have cleared up any confusion.

 

[humbug]

300 Watt APU's is too much, Its too difficult to cool something like that.

At the moment the biggest APU we have: 4 CPU Cores and a HD 7750 iGPU at 95 Watts.

The next generation needs to be maybe in 4 steps.

4 Cores + 260X iGPU performance @ 75 Watts
4 Cores + 270X iGPU performance @ 125 Watts
6 Cores + 280X iGPU performance @ 200 Watts
8 Cores + 290X iGPU performance @ 250 Watts

 

[Boomstick777]

Up to 300W with AIO will be fine. Think about it peeps a single AIO with small RAD can handle the 295X2 (500W TDP), it cools 2 x 290X GPU's . A single APU with AIO will be absolutely fine !!

Would only need the one fan for Mini-ITX. Would be my ideal setup, nice and quiet.

I'll be waiting a long time though for a decent performer @ 1440P though.

14nm.
HBM.
Upgraded GPU / CPU architecture.
Higher TDP limit.

Should go a long way to making proper gaming APU's on PC a reality. Decent 1080P gaming should be possible next year.

 

[Martini1991]

Boom, you've basically been repeating the same line for about 2 years now.